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The motivation for this course is that educational researchers could do better research if they had clearer understandings of basic demographic concepts, techniques, and resources. I have tried to design this course to be as practical as possible. I’d like to move fairly quickly from some necessary theoretical and conceptual grounding in the field of demography to a usable bag of tricks. We will spend a lot of time reading and discussing demographic research, with the goals of understanding why the researchers chose the methods and data that they did, how these methods work, and how we can replicate them. We will read several expository articles on how to "do" demographic research, and will get our hands dirty as much and as often as we can. By the end of the semester, you should be able to read at a reasonable level of comprehension research that uses demographic techniques and have begun to develop the ability to design and conduct your own demographic analyses. The class will work in small groups on a few common projects that will permit us to examine researchable issues in education using a variety of demographic techniques. As a class, we will develop one or more (depending on the size of the class) demographic research projects. These will take the form of a proposal to conduct a demographic research project. Each will contain a problem statement, brief review of the literature, detailed methodological plan and rationale, and some preliminary data analysis. There are many possibilities for good research topics, and they need not be limited to Iowa. We may want to draw on existing data from such sources as the National Center for Education Statistics, the Current Population Survey, or the National Longitudinal Surveys, as just some examples (see also the WEBSITES page for more). Please submit any paper assignment electronically as a Word attachment. Do not submit hard copies. Your grade will be based on your contribution to the group projects, the effort you put into preparing for class each week and a number of short written and oral assignments. If you do not have some facility with SPSS, I would strongly recommend taking a free short course from WEEG as early in the semester as possible. There are also dozens of books on how to use SPSS that are aimed at novice users. Finally, I want to run this class as much as possible as a seminar. For that to work, students need to come to class having read and thought about the material and prepared to discuss it and ask questions about it.
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